Paper short abstract:

Narratives of neoliberal dispossession are well known in studies of the global South. But what of more efficacious attempts to contest decommoning of urban public goods? This paper takes a non-capitalocentric approach to the city to examine opposition to decommoning of socialist housing in Vietnam.

Paper long abstract:

Narratives of neoliberal dispossession, despite resistance from a rights-claiming public, are well known in critical urban studies of the global South. But what of more efficacious attempts to contest displacement and the decommoning of public goods that have accompanied the privatization of cities? This paper takes a non-capitalocentric approach to the city to examine opposition to the decommoning of socialist housing in urban Vietnam. The unplanned obsolescence of Vietnam's model socialist city, built with the technological assistance of East Germany, provided fodder for capitalist redevelopment and demolition of the celebrated "solidarity" buildings in a post-Cold War global order. This paper traces the struggles that ensued between the state, developers, and residents, who organized collectively to demand inclusion in the fraught project of urban "renewal." I show how denationalization of state property was a contested process that threatened to dismantle the urban commons. In so doing, it generated political subjectivities that ascribed historical, ecological, technical, and affective values to the crumbling housing blocks and their generous communal spaces. In refusing to separate the logic of the commons from that of urban growth, residents resisted the re-spatialization of inequality in the city, while disrupting the capitalist cycle of raze and rebuild.